Mc-Kenna.com

I’ve always found that Exchange’s webmail system, aka “Outlook Web Access”, to be extremely buggy regarding remembering who you are. It sets sessions cookies with a pretty far-away timeout but regardless of whether I’m connected via a VPN or from the public internet it always delights in logging me out as quickly as it can. Well, I’ve worked out a work-around for these all too frequent occurrences. Here’s what you do:

• When you are provided with the login prompt, login.
• Click the Back arrow in your browser until it asks if you would like to resubmit the form again.
• Click Cancel.
• Click Back again. This will take you back to the original edit window with the fresh empty (or if it was a reply, the original quote) edit page ready to go.
• Click Forwards. It will say that it needs to resubmit a form in order to proceed.
• Click OK / Accept / Aye Cap’n, whatever is the appropriate response to the affirmative.
• Your message has now been sent, just like when you originally clicked Send.

Hopefully this will help some others who are also loosing their hair over this stupidity.

Here’s a little tidbit. If you ever get “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SR” errors in PHP, check to see if you had any svn merge conflicts. This error raised its ugle head this evening for me and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. Then just bounce over to your svn client of choice, fix the conflict (or just delete the offending files and grab the latest file again), and the error will disappear.

Good news today via /. as a research team have discovered fundamental flaws in Windows Vista that make its “security” system completely useless and unable to be fixed to stop the flaw. In other words, WIndows Vista is broken and cannot be fixed. Yay :-)

• Windows Vista’s security platform rendered useless

Time for my D&D half-orc persona’s ceremony of choice.

As mentioned before, PHP is misconfigured on OSX and you don’t get their customized sourcecode in order to recompile it with the options you need. As such you can’t run the GD plugin which is what most OSS programs use for image processing, and is generally the most recommended way of doing it. For Drupal’s ImageCache / ImageAPI module(s) what you can do instead is install the ImageMagick package and then just tell Drupal to use the ImageAPI-ImageMagick module instead of the GD one. I’ve already got ImageMagick installed on my McBook for Rails use so it was only a few seconds to get it going for Drupal too.

To continue the Dark Knight theme, I think that Heath Ledger passing away so young would have been like Jack Nicholson dying after making One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is such a breathtaking demonstration of acting ability. By this point in Nicholson’s career he’d already received several major award nominations, as had Ledger, and each of these two movies (looked liked it) pushed each actor to their respective limits. Nicholson then went on to win several major awards, including the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest. Of course my comparison is not without its irony - Nicholson went on to play the Joker in Tim Burton’s original Batman movie in 1989. Food for though.

Reasons to use Trac:

• It has been around for ages so it’s pretty well known.
• It works with Subversion.
• Built-in Wiki.
• The milestones system works fairly well.

Why Trac sucks, IMHO of course:

• It’s written in Python, a language I currently don’t know nor have a (current) inclination to learn.
• It doesn’t do git without a plugin.
• How do I get email notifications when something’s changed in the wiki?
• How do I get email notifications when code changes are uploaded?
• Each project you want to manage with it gets its own separate install, which is very klunky. You have to log into each one separately (unless you set up a shared authentication system of some sort in the web server).
• Each project only gets one repository.
• The interface is klunky, e.g. clicking View Tickets brings you to a page where you first have to choose your filter rather than just loading the last one used or a default.
• No task associations so you can’t do a parent-child dependency to indicate a completion hierarchy.
• The interface should allow for trag-n-drop changing of priorities.
• It isn’t github or unfuddle or Redmine :)

Personally I recommend github for public projects where you don’t need task management (I don’t like Lighthouse), Unfuddle for closed projects or where you want good task management for your open project, or Redmine if you want full control and to host it all yourself.

Just thought I’d share that.

In case you haven’t seen it already, I present some reasons to see The Dark Knight aka Batman 2:

• (at the time of writing) The Dark Knight is the highest rated movie on IMDB with a score of 9.5 average out of over 90,000 votes, beating The Godfather.
• It was Heath Ledger’s last movie and he was a great actor who’s work we should respect and watch.
• The reports I read way back when indicated he got so completely into his character that he had terrible problems pulling himself out of it afterwards.
• Christopher Nolan directed and co-wrote it, and he did the last Batman Begins movie, The Prestige, Insomnia and Momento.
• It has Christian Bale as Batman, who I’ve thought has been an awesome actor ever since making Empire of the Sun back in 1987 as a child. He also was in Equilibrium (yes, I liked it), The Machinist, The Prestige, and others.
• It’s not only a good comic-book flick but also a fantastic detective story. Yes, there’s a real story in it.
• There’s an IMAX version with several scenes filmed specially to take advantage of the larger screen.
• Because I said so? :)

In an interest to keep my mind off other matters.. An interesting rant against the XFiles 2 movie that opens this week. My take:

• If you haven’t seen The Dark Knight, go see it.
• If you have seen The Dark Knight, go see it again.
• If you’ve already seen it twice, got see Hellboy 2.
• The show itself was so over-done by the end it was like the Griswald family christmas turkey.
• Did I mention going to see The Dark Knight? Good. Do it.